Wright, Frank Lloyd Lincoln

Wright, Frank Lloyd Lincoln (1869–1959). American architect, some say the greatest of C20. He learned the rudiments of his art from Joseph Lyman Silsbee (1845–1913), whose essays in the Queen Anne and Shingle styles were competent. He later (1888) became assistant to Louis H. Sullivan, and remained with the firm of Adler & Sullivan until 1893. While revering Sullivan, Wright was also influenced by Owen Jones, the English Arts-and-Crafts movement, Ruskin, and Viollet-le-Duc (or rather by what Viollet was said to have written), interlocking forms (perhaps suggested by the Froebel blocks with which he played when a child), and Japanese architecture (prompted by the Japanese pavilion at the Chicago Exposition of 1893). In 1889 he designed his first independent building, his own house and studio at Oak Park, Chicago, IL, an eclectic work, with a shingled exterior (altered and extended 1889–1911), and in 1894 became a founder-member of the Arts-and-Crafts Society in Chicago. At this time he began to evolve his Prairie House type, with volumes developing from a central core, long, low roofs that appeared to float over the structure, corners treated as voids, and enclosing walls that were treated more as independent screens (techniques he called ‘breaking the box’). Furthermore, the main axes within the houses were continued into the gardens and terraces, suggested in the schemes Wright published in the Ladies' Home Journal (1901), and developed in the series of houses he designed from that time until just before the 1914–18 war. Yet Lutyens had also been moving in this direction, as with the Deanery, Sonning, Berks. (1899–1902), while Schinkel had also brought gardens, water, and terraces within his profoundly ordered geometries, as at the Court Gardener's House and Roman Baths complex, Potsdam (1820s). Wright's finest essays in the Prairie House style were the Willitts House, Highland Park, IL (1902), Robie House, Chicago (1908), and Coonley House, Riverside, IL (1908–12).

With the Unity Temple (Unitarian Church), Oak Park (1906), and the Larkin Building, Buffalo, NY (1904—demolished), a severe, monumental architecture evolved, in which a powerful grid-like geometry was well to the fore, while the architectural language seemed to owe something to a stripped Classicism reminiscent of aspects of the work of Schinkel, Otto Wagner, and others (especially the rows of square columns at Unity Temple which recall the Berlin Schauspielhaus (Play House) by Schinkel and some of the Vienna Metropolitan Railway Stations by Wagner).

Wright's work had been widely publicized, and in 1910 Wasmuth of Berlin published Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Realized Buildings and Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright) as a handsome pair of portfolios, followed in 1911 by a paperback volume of illustrations and plans. The introduction was by C. R. Ashbee, the prominent English Arts-and-Craftsman, and these publications helped to promote Wright's work. His designs seem to have enjoyed considerable favour in Germany (Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were two architects affected) and in The Netherlands, in particular, where Robert van't Hoff, Dudok, and some members of De Stijl were undoubtedly influenced by his work, and it shows. In 1911 he moved to the Wisconsin countryside, where he built his Prairie House-based home and studios at Taliesin (burnt down 1914, but rebuilt and extended during the 1920s). There he was the Master with his pupils, a pose he developed further at Taliesin West, mentioned below.

In spite of a scandalous private life he gained two important major commissions: the Midway Gardens, Chicago (1913—demolished); and the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan (1915–22—with Antonin Raymond—also demolished). Both had highly organized plans in which axes featured prominently, and both were lavishly decorated with polygonal, triangular, and other sharp-angled forms, including chevrons, that had already begun to appear on the lead cames of some of the Chicago houses, and that anticipated Art Deco ornament. With the Hollyhock (or Barnsdall) House (1916–21), Los Angeles, Calif., he experimented with repetitive stylized motifs (abstractions of hollyhock forms) cast in moulds (the whole house was cement-rendered), and created a building faintly reminiscent of pre-Columbian American architecture, a theme more pronounced in the Ennis House, Los Angeles (1923–4), constructed of decorated concrete blocks, and featuring battered walls set on terraces. He again used concrete blocks in e.g. the Millard House, Pasadena, CA (1923), and Freeman House, Los Angeles (1923–4), but for the rest of the decade his work did not attract the attention his earlier designs had enjoyed. In the 1930s, however, Wright's buildings were once more widely publicized.

At the Kaufmann House (1935–48), ‘Falling Water’, Connelsville, PA (1935–48), he gave full expression to horizontals and verticals in a tour-de-force constructed over a stream called Bear Run, a design that had superficial resemblances to the International Modernism of the time, but, with its coursed rubble walls and hand-crafted detail, owed more, perhaps, to the Arts-and-Crafts tradition, while the disposition of elements derived from his Prairie House type. In 1936–9 he designed and built the Johnson Wax Factory, Racine, WI, with a tall interior the roof of which was supported by tapered mushroom-shaped columns, the walls being of brick with glass tubes forming the light-sources. At the same time he developed his low-cost Usonian houses, based on vernacular American buildings, that explored the possibilities of prefabrication. The prototype was the Jacobs House, Madison, WI (1936–7), and Wright publicized his ideas in Architectural Forum of 1938. He also evolved proposals for Broadacre City, a low-density plan in which the Usonian house would feature large. In 1937 he designed Taliesin West, winter quarters for himself and his disciples, which he built at Scottsdale, AZ From 1942 he prepared designs for the Guggenheim Museum, NYC (completed 1960), a spiral ramp that proved to be an inappropriate form for viewing works of art, but as an exercise in formal geometry was remarkable for its time. At Bartlesville, OK, he designed the Price Tower (1953–6), a tall block rather more elegant than the slabs so prevalent during that period, demonstrating Wright's interest in the acute angles he had also employed at Taliesin West. Among his last works the Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, Calif. (1957–66), and the Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, PA (1958–9), deserve note.

Wright has been seen as an exponent of organic architecture, by which he seems to have meant design that proceeds from the nature of Mankind and his circumstances as they both change. Although his writings suffer from rather obvious conceit, prolixity, and dense obfuscation (e.g. An Autobiography (1943), An Organic Architecture (1939), and When Democracy Builds (1945)), they were collected and published as Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings 1894–1940 (1941) and In the Cause of Architecture: Essays by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Architectural Review 1908–1952 (1975).

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